This week I was joined by dozens of visitors for the unveiling of an exciting new part of our Watson IoT Center in Munich, Germany. The new Government Industry Lab is an extension of the industry section of the Center, which provides tangible examples of how IoT and cognitive technologies are impacting how we live and work including automotive, manufacturing and worker safety. Government leaders are continually challenged to improve program outcomes, optimize service delivery, and strengthen security, safety and resilience. They face these challenges knowing they have to build capabilities to identify hidden patterns, apply insight with speed and build knowledge that will better enable them to enhance and protect the economic vitality of the citizens and communities they serve. The new Government Industry Lab is designed to help government organizations with these challenges. It demonstrates real examples of how understanding sensor data from the environment and within our cities through cognitive technologies can offer new insights and improve quality of public services.

Is your learning establishment preparing for – or even aware of – the next revolution in human development: robots educating our young? Artificial intelligence (AI), though rudimentary at the moment, is already having an impact on daily life. Your mobile phone is fast becoming a personal assistant, learning to anticipate your needs. Computer games contain virtual characters that learn to respond to their environment and smart cars are doing the same in the real world. And the UK government is keen for the country to exploit AI, publishing a report on the impact of AI on the economy, estimating that it could add another £630bn to the UK economy by 2035.

Update: We've had the iPhone X on test for over a day now, and we've got a video with our early thoughts thus far in our iPhone X 24 hour diary. Early findings show a strong Face ID performance and an impressive screen - does it do enough for iPhone fans though? Apple's long-awaited iPhone X pre-orders are now live, which means the official release date is next week: Friday November 3. You may not be able to buy Apple's highly anticipated smartphone right away. Finding it in stock on launch day is going to be extremely difficult, though we are tracking iPhone X pre-orders in the US, and the best iPhone X deals in the UK. Apple claims that the iPhone X, which is pronounced'iPhone 10', is worth your money and any extra wait time due to its revolutionary new features. The iPhone X wasn't the only smartphone announced by CEO Tim Cook at Apple's recent September 12 launch event.

Episode two of Blue Planet II could be one of Sir David Attenborough's scariest shows yet - giving us a glimpse of life in total darkness that we are only just starting to explore. The episode also looks at peculiar gardens that are thriving in the pitch black as well as species of coral that have never been seen in shallower waters. The fangtooth (pictured) has the largest teeth relative to body size for any fish in the entire ocean. The filming of Blue Planet involved around 1,000 people from producers to deep sea divers, researchers to scientists, camera crews to helicopter pilots and drone operators. Some 125 expeditions were undertaken across every ocean, with 1,500 days spent at sea and 6,000 hours underwater.

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can create a high- definition version of a low resolution image. Technology to create a large-sized image from a low- resolution image is known as single-image super-resolution (SISR) technology. SISR has been studied for decades, but with limited results. Software adds extra pixels and averages them with the surrounding pixels, but the result is blurriness. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Intelligent Systems in Germany proposed a new approach to give images a realistic texture when magnified from small to large using machine learning.

Firebase's development platform will receive a series of updates focused on tightening the integration of Firebase services and incorporating more machine learning technology into the toolkit, the Google-owned company announced today at the Firebase Dev Summit in Amsterdam. Firebase is a mobile platform for developing high-quality applications. The first notable update is the integration of Crashlytics by Fabric, which Google acquired in January. Crashlytics enables uses to track, prioritize, and fix stability issues within applications in real time. The integration will be rolled out over the next couple of weeks.

Robots are set to take 600,000 UK builders' jobs in the next 20 years, according to a new report. Nearly one in three construction roles could be wiped out over the next two decades by robots and digital technology, the report found. Research by London-based engineering giant Mace said 600,000 of the current 2.2 million positions in the industry could be automated by 2040 in what it called the'fourth industrial revolution'. Research by engineering giant Mace said 600,000 of the current 2.2 million positions in the industry could be automated by 2040 in what it called the'fourth industrial revolution'. By 2040, there will be just 15,500 carpenters and interior fitters, down from 260,000 now, and the number of labourers will slump from 127,000 to 7,500.

Whatever your take on automation's impact on labor, we can all surely agree that future work will require, well, future skills. Because when robots take over manual tasks and AI can handle jobs that previously required a brain, what remains to be done by humans will, naturally, be different from what is done today. Now a new report by the British innovation foundation Nesta and University of Oxford future-gazers from the Oxford Martin School tries to establish how those changes will affect skill requirements by 2030. First, the team behind the research identified occupations that look set to be automated away (such as shelf fillers, van drivers, and administrators) and those that are likely to grow in the face of technology's encroachment (including teachers, biotech researchers, and nurses). Then, they looked at the skills that were most common among the occupations that had the greatest prospect of growing in the future, to work out which would be most useful when the robots come.

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system to successfully predict earthquakes, an advance that may help prepare for natural disasters and potentially save lives. The study, published in the journal Geophysical Review Letters, identified a hidden signal leading up to earthquakes, and used this'fingerprint' to train a machine learning algorithm to predict future earthquakes. Researchers from University of Cambridge in the UK and Boston University in the US studied the interactions among earthquakes, precursor quakes and faults, with the hope of developing a method to predict earthquakes. Using a lab-based system that mimics real earthquakes, they used machine learning techniques to analyse the acoustic signals coming from the'fault' as it moved and search for patterns. Researchers used steel blocks to closely mimic the physical forces at work in a real earthquake, and also records the seismic signals and sounds that are emitted.

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system to successfully predict earthquakes, an advance that may help prepare for natural disasters and potentially save lives. The study, published in the journal Geophysical Review Letters, identified a hidden signal leading up to earthquakes, and used this'fingerprint' to train a machine learning algorithm to predict future earthquakes. Researchers from University of Cambridge in the UK and Boston University in the US studied the interactions among earthquakes, precursor quakes and faults, with the hope of developing a method to predict earthquakes. Using a lab-based system that mimics real earthquakes, they used machine learning techniques to analyse the acoustic signals coming from the'fault' as it moved and search for patterns. Researchers used steel blocks to closely mimic the physical forces at work in a real earthquake, and also records the seismic signals and sounds that are emitted.